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Comment by martin_a | Hacker News Reader

> It may be also easier to parse than an overloaded omnnibox/location/search/navigation/security/menu bar.

I think the point is that Google doesn't want users to be able to parse this much information. Keep the people dumb, if you want to call it that way. Or uninformed, uneducated, whatever.

"Enter whatever you want to know or see in this field and we will do some magic so you get what you want".

That's where they want to go, no doubt about it as Google probably profits the most from technically-uneducated users of its services.

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Particularly given that you have a whole generation now that grew up with these technologies, the proportion of technically litterate users will go up over time not down.

Growing up with technologies is not enough to be technically literate. I would say it's the opposite, you grew up with it so you don't really think about how it works.

It's the fallacy of digital natives: http://ecdl.org/policy-publications/digital-native-fallacy

If that would be true, we would see much more skepticism against home assistant technologies, social networks, "funny apps" and alike. I think people fail to grasp the full impact of technology on their lives, although (or because) they are surrounded by it.

I don't know... I've known the internet since before the web was the internet. I know there's irc, ftp, etc. To those that grew up with the web, there is nothing beyond the web. The web is the internet. At the rate we're going, in time the new generations will rarely see a URL and won't know what they are exactly or what they're for. Google will be a necessary gateway to access anything on the internet.

But what you are describing is a tiny insignificant minority of very technical users from the 90s, amongst a population who didn't understand it at all (cf all the 1990s movies where the actor turns off the monitor instead of the computer!).

What I am trying to point at is the vast number of users born after 1990 that have a decent basic understanding of these technologies. And within that generation, the portion that has a similar deep understanding to 1990s users is a population which by absolute size is several orders of magnitude larger what it was in the 1990s. And it is going to keep increasing.

You said:

> the proportion of technically litterate users will go up over time not down.

I take the proportion to mean "out of all internet/computer users". That has gone down. And that's the proportion that I think matters as it's what dictates the direction internet/computer technologies go. The proportion is going down, precisely because more people are using these technologies and the majority are not willing to learn as much.

>To those that grew up with the web, there is nothing beyond the web

arguably the web is the legacy thing for places that dont have apps, and native apps are mostly what they are familiar with.

That's absolutely not true. See e.g. how literate are people about cars, vs. how they were 40 years ago.

See also the classical 2013 rant on the topic: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co....

I'm not that optimistic. Technical literacy tends to peak with literate/interested users who saw the rise of a technical medium. (E.g., I guess, my grandfather knew more about the intrinsics of a radio, even if I try to educate myself watching tube radio repair videos. High frequency stuff was generally sorted out, before I was born. I'm a high frequency native, but not necessarily an expert.) As things start to become more complex and tend to be more tightly integrated at the same time, the underlying technology somewhat vanishes. If you are faced with this as a fait accompli, it isn't natural anymore to investigate what is ultimately an opaque module. However, this opaque module is our universal means of production, communication and creativity. We may have to counteract what may be a tendency towards simplification and taking things for granted.

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